We have decided not to follow the UOP's usage of Installation Codes. All 'channels' are available to the System Administrator at time of installation.

Similar to the practice of the upstream vendor, there is no supported path to 'upgrade' an installation of a prior major CentOS release (presently CentOS 5) to a new major release. This is not a CentOS imposed limitation, but rather reflects the upstream's approach on this matter. People who feel adventuresome and want to experiment are reminded to take and test backups first. As a note to people who attempt the upgrade in spite of this warning, such as by the unsupported upgradeany option from the media install command line, please note that you will need to manually retrieve the current centos-release package, manually do a rpm -e --nodeps removal of the prior centos-release package, and then manually install the CentOS 6 centos-release package, before yum can have any chance of working properly.

The continuous release (CR) repository makes generally available packages that will appear in the next point release of CentOS, on a testing and hotfix basis until formally released.

Please read through the other sections before trying an install or reporting an issue.

3. Install Media and sha1sum

The installation kit is split into two DVDs. It is possible to do a full install with only the first DVD. The second DVD contains only supplementary RPMs, which can be installed afterwards if needed. The installer does not ask for the second DVD during installation.

4. Major changes

The Precision Time Protocol - previously a technology preview - is now fully supported. The following drivers support network time stamping: bnx2x, tg3, e1000e, igb, ixgbe, and sfc.

OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.0.1.

OpenSSL and NSS now support TLS 1.1 and 1.2.

KVM received various enhancements. These include improved read-only support of VMDK- and VHDX-Files, CPU hot plugging and updated virt-v2v-/virt-p2v-conversion tools.

Hyper-V and VMware drivers have been updated.

Updates to Evolution (2.32) and Libre Office (4.0.4).

5. Deprecated Features

As already mentioned with the release of 6.4, matahari is now deprecated and is no longer available with 6.5.

The following packages have been deprecated as well and may get removed in future releases. They will no longer receive updates:

mingw-gcc

mingw-boost

mingw32-qpid-cpp

python-qmf

python-qpid

qpid-cpp

qpid-qmf

qpid-tests

qpid-tools

ruby-qpid

saslwrapper

6. Known Issues

The upstream Mozilla NSS disabled support for MD5 hash signed certificates in the 3.14 release, which was added to CentOS 6.4. More details and workarounds can be found in this Fedora bugzilla report

Up to version 4.3.6 of VirtualBox the building of the openGL module will fail. See also this thread. This is solved with version 4.3.8 of vBox.

On Intel and AMD based processor architectures, CentOS 6 requires PAE support for 32-bit x86 chips, following the upstream's requirement

The installer needs at least 406MB of memory to work. Text mode will automatically be used if the system has less than 632MB of memory.

The text installer has limited capabilities compared to the GUI installer. Most notably there is no support for configuring partition layout, storage methods or package selection. Please refer to the official documentation for details. Here you can find some useful information on creating and using kickstart files which can be used to perform advanced configuring without the need for the GUI installer.

The message "Insufficient memory to configure kdump!" appears during install. This is a known issue which appears on systems with less than 2 GB RAM. This can be ignored.

Content for both the i386 and x86_64 architectures is split into two DVDs. We have tried to get all basic server and basic desktop installs only from DVD-1.

Make sure that you setup correctly the selinux context of the public key if you transfer it to a CentOS 6 server with selinux enabled. Otherwise selinux might forbid access to the ~/.ssh/authorized_keys file and by matter of consequence key authentication will not work. In order to setup the correct context you can use:

restorecon -R -v /home/$ACCOUNT/.ssh

ssh-copy-id from CentOS 6 is aware of selinux contexts and the previous workaround is not needed.

Many people have complained that Ethernet interfaces are not started with the new default NetworkManager tool. See CentOS-6 FAQ#2.

The full x86_64 install and the minimal ISO are bootable on EFI-hardware (For further detail please take a look at CentOS Bug #0006321).

Several packages have .centos. in their name but are not modified packages, see CentOS Bug #0005281 for details. Here are the SRPMS still affected in the 6.5:

at-spi

gtk2-engines

libcanberra

libgail-gnome

libwmf

The proprietary drivers for older AMD (former ATI) video cards, namely the 2xxx, 3xxx and 4xxx series (both integrated in motherboards or standalone cards) are not compatible with the new version of the X server introduced in CentOS-6.4. As of mid-March 2013 the only known workaround allowing the use of the proprietary drivers is to downgrade the X server (xorg* packages) to the versions available in CentOS 6.3. More details about the extensive investigation around this issue is available here. Make sure that you do not allow yum to upgrade again the packages that have been downgraded by adding the following to the end of /etc/yum.conf

exclude=xorg*

Note that use of proprietary drivers was never needed for CentOS-6 if all you wanted was a dual-monitor setup. See this FAQ entry for more details on using a dual-monitor setup.

There may be some i686 RPMs that are no longer available on the x86_64 media. If you have any of the following i686 RPMs installed on your x86_64 system, please remove the i686 RPMs before attempting to upgrade: dovecot-devel, evolution-mapi, evolution-mapi-devel, iscsi-initiator-utils, iscsi-initiator-utils-devel, openchange, openchange-devel, boost-*, python.i686.

One can do USB key installs by using dd to copy individual ISO files to a USB key using the device name (not the partition name). This will overwrite the entire USB key. Here is an example for the DVD1:

dd if=CentOS-6.5-x86_64-bin-DVD1.iso of=/dev/sdb

There is an issue running Microsoft Windows on VMware Workstation using glib2-2.26.1-3 and kernel-2.6.32-431 (included in CentOS-6.5). Please see this discussion on VMware.com

7. Fixed Issues

8. Packages and Applications

8.1. Packages modified by CentOS

abrt

anaconda

dhcp

esc

fake-provides

firefox

gnome-applets

gnome-desktop

httpd

initscripts

kabi-whitelists

kabi-yum-plugins

kde-settings

kernel

libreport

librsvg2

luci

ntp

openssl-0.9.8e

pcs

plymouth

qemu-kvm

redhat-bookmarks

redhat-indexhtml

redhat-logos

redhat-lsb

report

sos

system-config-date

thunderbird

virt-p2v

xorg-x11-server

xulrunner

yum

8.2. Packages removed from CentOS that are included upstream

cc-eal4-config

libehca

libservicelog

lsvpd

libvpd

openssl-ibmca

powerpc-utils

ppc64-diag

ppc64-utils

python-rhsm

Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux-Release_Notes*

redhat-indexhtml

redhat-release-*

redhat-release-notes*

rhn-client-tools

rhnlib

rhn-setup

rhn-setup-gnome

rhnsdlibica

servicelog

s390utils

subscription-manager

subscription-manager-migration-data

yaboot

yum-rhn-plugin

8.3. Packages added by CentOS that are not included upstream

centos-indexhtml

centos-release

centos-release-cr

8.4. Packages released as 6.4 updates with older packages on the 6.5 install media

And we encourage people to join any of these SIGs or start up a new SIG, e.g.

Alpha, S390, Sparc and PPC port - help with porting CentOS to other architectures

Hardware compatibility - provide feedback about specific hardware

RPM Packaging - contribute new useful RPM packages

Translation - help translating the documentation, website and Wiki content

10.2. Mailinglists and Fora

Another way you can help others in the community is by actively helping and resolving problems that users come up against in the mailing lists and the fora.

10.3. Wiki and Website

Even as an inexperienced CentOS user we can use your help. Because we like to know what problems you encountered, if you had problems finding specific information, how you would improve documentation so it becomes more accessible. This kind of feedback is as valuable to others as it would have been to you so your involvement is required to make CentOS better.

So if you want to help out and improve our documentation and Wiki, register on the Wiki or subscribe to the centos-docs mailing list.

11. Further Reading

The following websites contain large amounts of information to help people with their CentOS systems :

12. Thanks

We thank everyone involved for helping us produce this product and would like to specifically acknowledge the extra effort made by the QA Team. Without them working almost 24/7 we couldn't have released this as fast as we did.